MRS BREEN: (Squeezes his arm, simpers.) Naughty cruel I was!
BLOOM: (Low, secretly, ever more rapidly.) And Molly was eating a sandwich of spiced beef out of Mrs Joe Gallaher’s lunch basket. Frankly, though she had her advisers or admirers, I never cared much for her style. She was...
MRS BREEN: Too...
BLOOM: Yes. And Molly was laughing because Rogers and Maggot O’Reilly were mimicking a cock as we passed a farmhouse and Marcus Tertius Moses, the tea merchant, drove past us in a gig with his daughter, Dancer Moses was her name, and the poodle in her lap bridled up and you asked me if I ever heard or read or knew or came across...
MRS BREEN: (Eagerly.) Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.
(She fades from his side. Followed by the whining dog he walks on towards hellsgates. In an archway a standing woman, bent forward, her feet apart, pisses cowily. Outside a shuttered pub a bunch of loiterers listen to a tale which their brokensnouted gaffer rasps out with raucous humour. An armless pair of them flop wrestling, growling, in maimed sodden playfight.)
THE GAFFER: (Crouches, his voice twisted in his snout.) And when Cairns came down from the scaffolding in Beaver street what was he after doing it into only into the bucket of porter that was there waiting on the shavings for Derwan’s plasterers.
THE LOITERERS: (Guffaw with cleft palates.) O jays!
(Their paintspeckled hats wag. Spattered with size and lime of their lodges they frisk limblessly about him.)
BLOOM: Coincidence too. They think it funny. Anything but that. Broad daylight. Trying to walk. Lucky no woman.